From Eater:
I saw Laura Shapiro walking down the street slightly before she noticed me, and even though I’d never met or seen her before, I immediately knew who she was. She’s a petite woman with short, stylish salt-and-pepper hair and big wire-framed glasses. If you live in New York, you might recognize her type — these small women walking with authority, who look at the world around them with interest and the kind of confidence that only comes from growing and changing alongside the city for decades. Shapiro also has a sweet, slightly mischievous smile, an implicit promise that anyone lucky enough to get to talk to her will come away with great stories.
Shapiro’s physical smallness belies the Herculean nature of the project she’s just completed: a group biography, 10 years in the making, of the culinary lives of six historical women. What She Ate tells the “food stories” of poetry muse Dorothy Wordsworth, pioneering restaurateur Rosa Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, consort Eva Braun, novelist Barbara Pym, and Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown. Shapiro chose these particular wildly different women because they were all, in contemporary parlance, “influencers” — of art, culture, politics, and women’s roles in society. The only thing they all have in common besides that is that they all ate food.
Shapiro decided that we should dine at Tea and Sympathy, not for its ambiance but because its menu of stodgy British classics, cooked forever and thickly sauced, would have been familiar to, if not exactly welcomed by, two of What She Ate’s subjects. Rosa Lewis, an Edwardian chef and restaurateur, would have sniffed at it and loudly mentioned the superiority of her own cooking — simple French-influenced fare that led her to rise through the ranks of polite society from decidedly humble beginnings — while Barbara Pym, whose mid-century novels about single women have had a profound impact on today’s literary world, would have smiled and taken notes on what other people were eating, then gone home and prepared a delicious, simple feast of her own.
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The publication of What She Ate is a watershed moment for Shapiro. After spending much of her life devoted to the idea that everyday food and the women who prepare and serve it are worthy of interest, the world is finally catching up to her way of thinking. The kind of cooking and eating that she describes in her book — the homely, survival-oriented eating of everyday life, not special-occasion or restaurant food — has, historically, and almost exclusively, been done by women, and it’s only recently that the myriad things that women do silently and invisibly to keep civilization afloat have gained cultural currency.
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After writing several books about the doyennes of American cooking, the seeds of What She Atewere planted when Shapiro read a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, who kept house for her brother, William, the famous poet. A single detail — an out-of-character meal of heavy blood pudding in a life that had previously been sustained by ethereal repasts of gooseberries and broth — led Shapiro to the realization that writing about the role of food and eating in the lives of women who weren’t necessarily famous for anything food-related could be a way to tell their most intimate stories. “We’re meant to read the lives of important people as if they never bothered with breakfast, lunch or dinner, or took a coffee break, or stopped for a hot dog on the street, or wandered downstairs for a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding in the middle of the night,” Shapiro writes.
Link to the rest at Eater